Thank you, though I still don't think it is fully clarified, i.e., a "DDG ad" could still be a third-party one.

I understand your concern though and again will take it to the team. Popping up a level, though, the goal of our product is to be the "easy button" for privacy, and email protection is a big part of it, since as we (and others) have gotten much better at web tracking protection (e.g., see https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...), unscrupulous actors have done more and more email tracking, using your email address as a unique identifier to track you across sites and putting email trackers within emails to do similar. So, when you sign up for forms online, to escape this tracking, you really should be using a per-site alias, as well as using a service that strips email trackers from emails so you aren't tracked on email open.

I use DDG search as my daily driver. I want to support you and your mission. A simple “buy us a beer” link would probably get me donating/paying. However, this report of your extension adding interruptions to forms has guaranteed I will nevwr install your extension and strongly puts me off even trying your browser. It’s an abuse of the privilege your users grant you and you should stop it. It makes you look like you’re watching your users.

This. It is hard red line for me. Instantly uninstalled.

Wait until you find out how Safari interrupts your forms by default as well!

^ this

I am almost at the HN character limit, so it's a challenge to accurately describe in the title that DDG inserts its logo with a pop-out notification, requiring two clicks of interaction to dismiss, asking me to utilize another duckduckduckgo service in my inbox. I've altered it to "an inline popup," which I think is at least a more accurate way to describe this than an onboarding message (which wouldn't fit anyway). But frankly, as a user, to me it's an ad for another DDG service.

I've got no qualms with the product mission for the email tracking protection, I think it's a great one and I already utilize other email tracking protection myself . I made this post because I really like DuckDuckGo and I was just so astounded at this behavior. I tell everyone to "just use the duck website" because I really do believe in your stated mission, and I hope this post doesn't set off too much bandwagoning. My concern is voiced from a standpoint of support, not negativity. I really appreciate the opportunity to exchange this feedback with you directly and especially to add to this post that I really do generally love what you're building. When it doesn't get in my face when I'm trying to work.

I hope this post winds up being useful feedback. The decision to ship this into the product is mystifying to me. I would agree with the other users saying this should be recalled immediately while any internal discussion about it is ongoing.

> The decision to ship this into the product is mystifying to me.

Yegg discussed it the last time email protection came up on the front page - rolling it out internally into their android browser was the main goal, and the extension for others. The motivations are in the old hn posts. They could have rolled out a new app and extension, and maintained those on top of the current ones, but those would be extra codebases to maintain.

To clarify, the decision I find mystifying is the one to promote this via a phishy-feeling inline pop-up. The choice to incorporate email tracking protection into the product makes sense to me.

Yeah, considering how it has caught people off guard, a toggle in the settings, maybe an overview of it in a splash screen on their site, something before the actual form fill shows up. I'm curious if they discussed that much. It definitely would have kept the feature more obscure, so you can guess at the push back.